Tag: Events of the Day

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Sheila O’Malley, a blogger whose insight I aspire to reaching maybe ten percent one day, posted the following to Facebook earlier, and she gave me permission to reproduce it here.

I came home from the Trans Siberian Orchestra concert last night (out at Nassau Coliseum) and it was about 1 in the morning when I got home. It’s been a bit of a blue time for me personally, and then of course the tragedy in Connecticut has just been devastating for all of us. A horrible week. It was fun to go out and see this ridiculous over-the-top show, and when I got home I was a bit wired. I sat in bed reading 11/22/63 for a while (wow wow wow). And at one point, I heard a woman – either in my apartment building – or maybe in the house next door – sobbing. She was sobbing as if her heart was broken. It went on and on and it was the most heart-rending sound. I ached for her, whoever she was. Whatever she was dealing with was too hard to bear at 1:30, 2 in the morning. I understand that. There were times when she would quiet down, and I hoped she was passing out from exhaustion, to just get a little rest. 40 minutes would pass, and then the sobbing would start up again. There were times when the sound was so real and so painful that I felt tears welling up too. I was sending her vibes of at least peace and rest … everything looks at least more bearable in the morning. But, as F. Scott Fitzgerald so perfectly wrote: “In a dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning.” I am thinking about that woman today. I wonder if anyone has ever heard me sobbing and had the same reaction. I felt like I was protecting her, hovering over her, during that hour or so that I was listening to her. I know that sounds dumb, but that’s what it felt like. Anyway, I am thinking about her this morning. We all have our private pains. Be kind to one another. Be gentle. Assume that people are doing their best. The holidays are a tough time for many people as it is. Be gentle.

I absolutely believe that we need to have several discussions about public policy in this country, with regard to both guns and mental health care. But we also need to remember how to heal our societal wounds when things like this happen.

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I was nothing the 70th anniversary of Casablanca, but I didn’t even realize until a friend tweeted it that today is also the 90th anniversary of the opening of the tomb of King Tutankhamun of ancient Egypt, by archaeologists Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon. To this day it is one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in history.

When I was in kindergarten — I was five years old — my family went to see the Treasures of King Tut when they were displayed at a museum in Chicago. This was in 1977, according to Google. Now, I don’t remember a whole lot from that particular age of my life, but you can bet I remember quite a few of the items I saw on display there, culminating in one of the most magnificent objects ever made, the death mask of King Tut.

And then, a few years later, on a night in which my sister was babysitting me, she would take it into her head that I needed to know a song that some comedian named Steve Martin had written….

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Well how do you do, young Willy McBride
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside
And rest for a while ‘neath the warm summer sun?
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done!
I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
When you joined the great fallen in 1916.
I hope you died well,
And I hope you died clean,
Oh Willy McBride, was is it slow and obscene?

Did they beat the drums slowly?
Did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play the Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind?
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
Although you died back in 1916
In that faithful heart, are you forever nineteen?
Or are you a stranger without even a name
Enclosed then forever behind a glass pane,
In an old photograph torn, battered, and stained
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?

Did they beat the drums slowly?
Did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play the Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

The sun — now it shines on the green fields of France;
There’s a warm summer breeze, makes the red poppies dance.
And look how the sun shines from under the clouds!
There’s no gas, no barbed wire, no guns firing now
But here in this graveyard, it’s still no man’s land;
The countless white crosses stand mute in the sand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man —
To a whole generation that were butchered and damned.

Did they beat the drums slowly?
Did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play the Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

Oh young Willie McBride, I can’t help wonder why —
Do those that lie here know why they died?
And did they believe when they answered the call,
Did they really believe that this war would end wars?
For the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the pain,
The killing and dying it was all done in vain
For young Willy McBride it all happened again:
And again, and again, and again, and again!

Did they beat the drums slowly?
Did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play the Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

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This is a repost, but it always bears repeating!

Hey folks, I’ve mentioned this before on some previous Halloween’s, but I think it bears repeating. I write from my experience as a one-time employee of one of our nation’s many fine pizza-serving and delivering establishments. Basically, tonight’s Halloween, so you might consider refraining from ordering a pizza for delivery this evening. Why?

For one thing, since there are tons of kids about on the streets, with many of those dressed in dark clothing, many pizza delivery places will be quoting abnormally long delivery times, both because business might be up and because they may well be instructing their drivers to take as long as they need to deliver. Halloween is NOT the night to order a pizza and expect quick service. Believe me.

Secondly, if your household is not observing Halloween and will therefore be leaving all of your outside lighting off in order to dissuade trick-or-treaters, please oh please don’t order a pizza for delivery. Delivering pizzas at night isn’t rocket science, but it’s not ridiculously easy, either, and running deliveries on Halloween is actually pretty stressful when you’re trying to watch out for kids and figure out what house to go to. And if your lights are off, it makes your house even harder to find.

If you still feel that you just must order a pizza for delivery, despite the above, then at the very least, have some sympathy for the driver and increase your tip accordingly. Or just give him a tip at all, for you cheap jerks out there.

Or, you could just go get a pizza yourself, showing up early at the pizza place so you can eat before going out trick-or-treating or whatever. But if you do that, remember, you’re not the only person thinking along those lines; the pizza place will likely be getting an abnormally large number of orders significantly earlier than usual, which will have the expected slowing effect on service.

So, if pizza is on the menu tonight, adjust your service expectations accordingly and don’t be jerks. Or, just make it yourself!

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As I write this, we here in the Buffalo Niagara region are awaiting the increased pounding we’re going to receive as Hurricane Sandy’s course takes her on a path that will give us what is, compared to what the Jersey Shore and NYC Metro areas are receiving, a glancing blow. But a glancing blow from a hurricane, even as it diminishes to a tropical depression, can be quite a hairy thing.

At this point, what we’re expecting is high wind and a lot of rain. The ground is already wet from rains in the days ahead, and quite soft; the trees have grown their root systems to anchor against usual winds from the south and west, whereas this storm will be giving us winds from the north. So there’s quite a lot of potential for ugliness as this storm unfolds. Currently, its path is forecast to take the center of the storm on a course about sixty miles east of Casa Jaquandor.

As this happens, I’m thinking back on some weather events I recall from years past….

:: The Ash Rain of Portland. I have no idea what date this was, save that it happened either in 1980 or 1981. It was a cloudy, rainy day in the Portland, OR area, which isn’t all that remarkable in itself…except that Mt. St. Helens had just erupted, so the rain deposited about an inch of wet volcanic ash on everything. Dad was off at work, so it fell to me to shovel and hose all that ash off our driveway. This, as I recall, took me most of the day.

:: The tornadoes of Kane, PA, in 1985. Kane is a town about an hour south of Allegany, NY, where I grew up, and on one night in late spring, there was some volatile weather that led to tornadoes down there. At some point not too long after that, we drove through Kane on our way to Pittsburgh to see some relatives and family friends, and for the first time I saw actual tornado damage. It was something to behold. I’d always envisioned tornadoes as just destroying tons of stuff, and it did, but I hadn’t realized how localized the destruction was. We’d drive through quarter-mile-wide sections of forest that were leveled, and then we’d pass through a sharp line back to forest again. Ditto the houses; you’d see a house leveled next door to one that had lost a few windows. It was really amazing…and scary.

:: The Storm of the Century, 1993. This happened on a weekend that I was supposed to go back to college, from a spring break at home. An enormous storm formed that blanketed half the country, it felt like. My parents drove me to Clarion, PA, where I was to rendezvous with a guy I knew, with whom I would drive back to school in Iowa. The snow was already quite heavy as we drove what was normally a 90 minute trek to Clarion, and this was while the storm’s center was still in Georgia. Yup, it got worse. A lot worse.

The guy and I ended up staying in a hotel overnight in Clarion as the storm pounded the hell out of the entire Eastern seaboard; I’d later learn that it took my parents something like six hours to get home. The next morning it was all over but the digging, so we set out for Iowa, going very slowly at first. All the Interstates were closed in PA, and I remember crossing into Ohio near where I-80 enters PA, and seeing hundreds of semis and cars waiting for the road to open. What was really weird about that storm was that we didn’t really have to drive far to get out of the big snowfall region, and that it all melted in days anyway, since the storm was so late.

:: The Storm of November 2000. This one hit Buffalo not long after we moved here from the Southern Tier, and it was a doozy, resulting in kids snowed in at their schools, disastrously snarled traffic downtown, and The Wife, who was starting her new job, snowed in there, as well. It was the first time she’d been apart from me since The Daughter had been born. I wasn’t working at the time, so it wasn’t an enormous trainwreck, but wow…that one was brutal.

:: And then, a year later, it happened again, as something like seven feet piled up right where we lived at the time. Ouch. Worse was that The Wife was snowed in again at work! We were OK at home, since I was snowed in with my Mother-In-Law, who was visiting at the time. As I recall, we didn’t leave the apartment for three whole days. For years we would have a running joke that my in-laws never once visited Buffalo when the weather was any good. Even when they visited in summer, it was during a rainy cold snap.

:: The October Surprise storm. This is the most recent of the notorious Buffalo storms, happening in 2006. It was a lake-effect storm that dumped quite a bit of snow, although as I recall, the snow amounts themselves weren’t unheard of. What was harsh this time was that it happened in early October, before most of the trees had managed to drop their leaves, so the branches ended up getting piled with snow. As the weight increased, branches began breaking…on thousands of trees throughout the region. This resulted, of course, in huge power outages that lasted longer than a week in some places.

On the morning after the storm, I was driving to work. It was slow going, but I was moving along fine until I reached the top of a bridge right by The Store and got hung up on a big hunk of ice and snow. I wasn’t budging from there. The guy behind me is in an SUV and says, “I gotta get through…do you mind if I nudge you with my bumper?” I weighed the option, considered that the car wasn’t really my favorite anyway, and said, “Sure, bring it.” Which he did. I gave the guy the green-light to rear-end me. And it worked! Huzzah!

So, what weather-related adventures have you all had?

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You’d think that after doing the whole blogging and social networking thing for as long as I’d have, I wouldn’t be surprised that a tweet I quickly tossed off after reading about what a cold-hearted son-of-a-bitch Mitt Romney is actually got some attention, but…yeah, it’s a nice surprise. In a collection of reaction tweets to Romney’s waving-of-the-flag for conservative assholedom, Andrew Sullivan quoted mine. Woot!

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